Tucker Carlson's father was a longtime anchorman on local news in Los Angeles and San Diego, who later in his career served as Director of Voice of America in Europe, and then as President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Carlson wrote for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Policy Review, and The Weekly Standard, and came at issues "from the right" on CNN's Crossfire. He provided punditry on PBS's Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered, on MSNBC's Tucker from 2005 to 2008, and since then he has worked as a conservative talking head for Fox News. In 2010 he co-founded The Daily Caller, a conservative news blog.

His stint with CNN came to an end after a wild October 2004 episode of Crossfire, wherein comic Jon Stewart skewered Crossfire and specifically Carlson for "hurting America" with debate that was loud but rarely enlightening. "What you do is not honest," said Stewart. "What you do is partisan hackery. You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably." Several weeks later, in announcing that Carlson's services would no longer be needed, CNN president Jonathan Klein said, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." He promised that CNN would be moving away from what he called "head-butting debate shows".

In a 1999 article for Talk magazine, Carlson wrote that candidate George W. Bush swore like a truck driver. He also quoted Bush mocking Karla Faye Tucker, pleading "Please, don't kill me," after Bush signed her death warrant. In a 2000 column for CNN, he described Bush as "light, even when he shouts. And even when he shouts, he still can't seem to speak correctly." Carlson wrote that having Bush share the stage with John McCain made McCain seem like Winston Churchill. He has called Bill O'Reilly "a humorless phony." Carlson famously promised to eat his own shoe if Hillary Clinton's memoirs sold a million copies. When the book sold well over a million copies, Clinton presented Carlson with a cake baked in the shape of a "right wing-tip."